The Grey Zone
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I kept thinking of Levi’s words as I watched A Red Orchid Theatre’s production of Tim Blake Nelson’s The Grey Zone, a taut, well-directed, finely acted play based in part on Levi’s writings and in part on the reminiscences of other camp survivors, including Filip Muller and Dr. Miklos Nyiszli. Fortunately a good piece of theater can communicate in ways words alone cannot. Nelson’s work is packed with facts and observations about the way prisoners dressed, the way the camps were laid out, and the official and unofficial hierarchies. But the real brilliance of The Grey Zone is how well the playwright, director Dado, and her adept cast and crew re-create the look and feel of camp life, especially the unstated, pervasive existential dread that undergirded all activity.
Nelson focuses on a small facet of Auschwitz, the world of the Sonderkommando, or “special squads”–Jews who were recruited, often at gunpoint, to work in the crematoriums. They were responsible for tricking prisoners into undressing and entering the “showers,” for hauling the bodies from the gas chamber, for loading them into the ovens, then shoveling out the ashes and bits of bone. They had to pick through the victims’ belongings, dividing clothes into piles, extracting valuables sewn into clothing, even pulling gold fillings from the mouths of corpses.
Nelson, a screen and stage actor, has written other plays, including Eye of God (well received when Profiles produced it four years ago). But he’s best known for his role as the goofiest fugitive in the Coen brothers’ film O Brother, Where Art Thou? Perhaps because he’s an actor, Nelson knows exactly how to make each of the these dehumanized cogs in the Nazis’ machine–prisoners and guards alike–into a unique individual.
